KRIS B. HOFFLER I Have Memories, You Know

KRIS B. HOFFLER I Have Memories, You Know: Dream of the Gone-From City

Barbara Edelman. Dream of the Gone-From City. Pittsburgh, PA. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017. $15.95, paper.

In Barbara Edelman’s collection Dream of the Gone-From City,there is a question inherent in the title: will the overarching theme be dominated by loss, i.e. gone? Many of the poems contain speakers who are looking back, or trying to, to places and times in their lives that are no more. There are even two speakers with virtually no memory left of what was once their lives, yet they attempt to create some reference point based on what is in front of them.

To address these two extreme versions of loss, the poems “Maple Grove” and “Assisted Living” find the subjects in retirement homes. Both of them live with only brief, fragmented recollections of their previous lives. At the end of “Maple Grove,” we find what must be one of the children visiting the vacant father. The visitor makes note of the briefest of moments when the father catches a fleeting glimpse of the past.

Jerry O’Malley visited daily. “Milton Edelman!” He said it on arrival and departure. “Jerry O’Malley!” said my father to his friend, learning that to name the whole person is to hold him, fast, throughout the arc of his translation; to reconstitute him daily at the heart’s table.

“Assisted Living” is much more tragic. The elderly subject can remember nothing, even her identity. She lives in an eternal now where even the simplest of things are new mazes to wander.

… Each week she writes new algorithms to survive, from toothbrush

to spoon. Her softball glove, her Raleigh 3 speed are not even memory. Her new sports are dress, food, hygiene. A slalom course to every doorknob.

However, all the poems are not this bleak. The poem from which the title is derived explores the dream side of memory. The unknown speaker is walking through a post-apocalyptic dream derived from snippets of memory. In a moment of lucidity, the speaker questions her own mind:

… How could you choose this again and again? Why take the risk? To step into this vicious little detour-

The theme is continued through numerous speakers recalling apparitional places that were once real but now only exist in dreams or memories. Some memories are clear and seem to be accurate in the speaker’s mind; others are undoubtedly embellished into emotional landscapes.

These poems explore the idea of the word memory having an unspoken subtext of loss within it. On the other hand, it also has an opposing subtext of gain in that it brings something once lost back into a ghostly existence, no matter how altered from its original state. These poems are intelligent and brave in that they explore facts of our consciousness, and this is sometimes difficult to face. This is a vivid journey of the past through the lens of the human experience:

I have memories, you know. I’m not a person with a helium balloon for a head.